Inside the eccentricity of the Colony Room Green, London feels briefly suspended in time. Perched atop a piano rather than commanding centre stage in any conventional sense, Luvcat — Liverpool-born songwriter Sophie Howarth — transforms the intimate West End venue into something between a séance, cabaret and confessional as she launches her new EP Lovebites.
Luvcat @ Colony Room Green
Clad in her signature leopard-print and accompanied only by guitarist Archie Faulks and pianist Tom Fripp, with stripped-back arrangements lending the evening an almost parlour-room intimacy, Howarth delivers four songs threaded together by theatrical storytelling, deadpan humour and romantic chaos. It feels less like a showcase and more like being let into someone’s fever dream.
The night opens with an introduction to the mythology of Luvcat itself. Speaking directly to the room, Howarth traces her journey from waitressing in Liverpool and disastrous romances to relocating to London with a runaway bride friend and finding herself immersed in South London’s underground music scene. Sitting on the piano, she recounts nights in mould-ridden flats, haunted chandeliers (later revealed to be an upstairs washing machine) and chance encounters that would eventually shape the world around Lovebites, a companion to last year’s debut LP Vicious Delicious.
If the EP is billed as a collection of murder ballads, tonight reveals how deeply autobiographical its darkness really is.
Howarth frames each song with winding, cinematic anecdotes, read from a diary, that blur memory and folklore. Silent Killer lands as the emotional centrepiece of the set, introduced through an alarming true story about carbon monoxide poisoning in a Camden flat shared with bandmates and friends. Recalling how a faint late-night alarm likely saved lives, she reframes the experience into a metaphor for destructive love: invisible, intoxicating and quietly fatal.
Luvcat @ Colony Room Green
Performed in the present tense of confession, Silent Killer blooms into gothic melodrama. Sparse piano and guitar leave room for Howarth’s theatrical phrasing as she sings of love as poison, violence and devotion wrapped into one dangerous force. The humour remains — she jokes that carbon monoxide did not kill them, but love nearly did — yet the unease underneath never disappears.
There is a striking looseness to the performance. Howarth frequently breaks songs with anecdotes, laughs at herself, or slips into side observations that make the evening feel wonderfully unfiltered. One moment she is describing South London gig culture and sleeping in leopard-print dresses; the next she is casually recounting nearly dying in a gas leak.
That tension between glamour and morbidity defines Lovebites.
Before Electric Chair, Howarth introduces the track as an apology letter disguised as a murder ballad — a guilty plea for romantic wrongdoing. The song, written after falling for someone else while touring America, imagines punishment as melodrama: electrocution in luxury lingerie and burial in Paris’ Père Lachaise cemetery. She recounts how collaborator Pete Doherty organically became part of the track after touring together, wandering onstage during performances to contribute improvised lyrics before eventually recording his contribution remotely.
Even stripped of the EP’s studio theatrics, Electric Chair retains a smoky theatricality. Sitting atop the piano, Howarth delivers the song like a tragic heroine midway through an elaborate confession, half laughing at herself while never quite undercutting the emotional sincerity beneath the noir humour.
Luvcat @ Colony Room Green
The evening closes with He’s My Man, arguably the track that changed everything for Luvcat. Howarth explains how industry figures initially dismissed it as too strange, sinister and slow before audiences embraced its unsettling romanticism. Inspired partly by a ghost story told by her father and expanded into a tale of obsessive devotion and domestic menace, the song thrives in this intimate setting.
Its anniversary version features punk poet John Cooper Clarke, whom Howarth affectionately describes phoning on his landline while he made dinner for his grandchildren and researching poisoning symptoms for his lyrical contribution. “I wanted him to play my dead husband. He wasn’t too flattered but kindly agreed” she shares. Tonight, without the guest feature, the song becomes even more unnerving — a twisted lullaby of dependency, devotion and creeping dread.
Luvcat @ Colony Room Green
Throughout the set, Howarth repeatedly references formative influences, from Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue to the shadowy romanticism of Tom Waits, but what stands out most is how singular her world already feels. Gothic storytelling, sardonic humour, tenderness and theatrical absurdity coexist naturally rather than feeling curated. And she exudes an infectious charm that swells throughout tonight’s brief set.
At Colony Room Green, Lovebites does not arrive as a polished industry showcase. It feels alive, intimate and gloriously odd — murder ballads whispered from the piano lid while we lean in close to listen, eraptured.
After the performance, I briefly catch up with Howarth to talk about what comes next. Having spent the last year playing more than 100 shows and touring extensively for the first time, she explains that album two is already beginning to move away from the Liverpool-and-London mythology that shaped her earlier material.
“My first album was littered with Liverpudlian references and moving to London and running away to Paris occasionally. And the next album can’t possibly be about that, because I’ve been on tour for 101 shows, I’ve barely been home and I’ve been experiencing America for the first time, which is really something” she says.
Luvcat @ Colony Room Green
The next chapter, she hints, leans into the strange glamour and instability of sudden success. “Suddenly I have a fridge full of champagne and a four-poster bed,” she laughs. “I feel like a lucky little lady, and I want to talk about that in a cheeky way and embrace it. But I’m also aware it’s fickle and fragile. There’s this battle of wondering whether America would send me mad if I stayed there too long.”
With plans to record the follow-up just off Sunset Boulevard between summer festival appearances, Howarth seems eager to keep momentum building. “I don’t want to mess around,” she says with a grin. “I want to get it out as quickly as possible. Keep the train going, so the fans don’t suffer.”
Live review and interview with Luvcat @ Colony Room Green, London by Kalpesh Patel on 20th May 2026. Photography by Barnaby Fairley. Additional photos by Kalpesh Patel.
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